The Sicán culture

The Sicán culture, thought to descend from the Mochica, is associated with the Naymlap dynasty, based on a wide-reaching political confederacy emanating from the Lambayeque Valley between around 800 and 1300 AD. These people produced alloys of gold, silver and arsenic-copper in unprecedented scales in pre-Hispanic America. The name Sicán actually means “House of the Moon” in the Mochica language. Legend has it that a leader called Naymlap arrived by sea with a fleet of balsa boats, his own royal retinue and a green female stone idol. Naymlap set about building temples and palaces near the sea in the Lambayeque Valley. The region was then successfully governed by Naymlap’s twelve grandsons, until one of them was tempted by a witch to move the green stone idol. Legend has it that this provoked a month of heavy rains and flash floods, rather like the effects of El Niño today, bringing great disease and death in its wake. Indeed, glacial ice cores analyzed in the Andes above here have indicated the likelihood of a powerful El Niño current around 1100 AD.

The Sicán civilization, like the Mochica, depended on a high level of irrigation technology. The civilization also had its own copper money and sophisticated ceramics, many of which featured an image of the flying Lord of Sicán. The main thrust of the Lord of Sicán designs is a well-dressed man, possibly Naymlap himself, with small wings, a nose like a bird’s beak and, sometimes, talons rather than feet. The Sicán culture showed a marked change in its burial practices from that of the Mochica, almost certainly signifying a change in the prevalent belief in an afterlife. While the Mochica people were buried in a lying position – like the Mochica warrior in his splendid tomb at Sipán – the new Sicán style was to inter its dead in a sitting position. Excavations of Sicán sites in the last decade have also revealed such rare artefacts as 22 “tumis” (semicircular bladed ceremonial knives with an anthropomorphic figure stabbing where a handle should be).

The Sicán monetary system, the flying Lord of Sicán image and much of the culture’s religious and political infrastructures were all abandoned after the dramatic environmental disasters caused by El Niño in 1100 AD. Batán Grande, the culture’s largest and most impressive city, was partly washed away and a fabulous new centre, a massive city of over twenty adobe pyramids at Túcume, was constructed in the Leche Valley. This relatively short-lived culture was taken over by Chimu warriors from the south around 1370 AD, who absorbed the Lambayeque Valley, some of the Piura Valley area and about two-thirds of the Peruvian desert coast into their empire.